Sony DRU-710A HELP!

Just got one of these recently as a gift. Problem I am having is that it is supposed to be a 16X reader and writer, however in DVD shrink it's only reading at 900K - 2000K per second. Which means it takes about 2-3 hours to rip a DVD within DVD shrink.
It burns just fine however, it can burn a full 4.5 GB DVD in about 8 minutes. I'm just curious as to if anyone else has had this problem. I downloaded the latest version of ASPI from Nero. I put a new IDE cable in that now shows the burner in DMA mode 4, compared to DMA mode 2 compared to before. I reinstalled Nero, no luck.
The firmware shows BY03, even though BY02 is the latest on Sony's website. I installed BYo2 just to test it, no luck, so I put BY03 back on from a website on the net.
I also put the drive in another PC that has a Lite On burner that reads at 11,000+ K per second and was half the price. The Sony doubled in speed to 2,000 K but it still is about 1/5th of what I expected. PC is a 2.0 GHZ, 512 MB, ASUS MB, 533 FSB. I am stumped on this one.

Any suggestions, or should I just return the drive for a new one? Or maybe exchange it for one around the same price range that's better quality?

Have you tried doing the rip with dvd decrypter rather than dvd shrink? It should take 15-20 minutes to rip the dvd to the hard drive. Then open it up in shrink. In many cases, you'll want to reauthor and do a "movie only" burn. If you are trying to do it all with shrink, and are trying to copy all of a dual layer movie to a single layer dvd, I can understand why it takes 2-3 hours. Shrink will have to do a lot of analysis, and encoding, to get all that data compressed to a single layer dvd. I find that a movie only shrink will typically take about 20-30 minutes to encode, and then 15-20 minutes to burn. The whole process takes about an hour.

No I haven't, do you happen to know where I can get a copy of DVD decrypter? I'm pretty new to this. My friends has an older Sony 700 model and it reads faster then mine. I might give that decypter a shot. If that doesen't work, I'll probably send the drive back for a new one. If that doesen't work, I might just pay $18 on pricewatch.com for a straight 16X DVD Rom reader.

most dvd burners are locked , meaning the read speed is locked . some use hacked firmware to overcome this problem . a lite on or sony dvd rom are great dvd roms that will read much faster than a burner and save wear and tear on your burner .

hello, i have the same sony drive hooked up as secondary master, plextor premium secondary slave. my sony reads with shrink 11,000 no prob. I have amd 1800+ 256ram xp pro sp2. the firmware i'm using is byx2 got off sony site. is your ide cable 80 pin?
sorry i failed to mention that i use reauthor mode to get main movie only in shrink.

Yeah, I have mine hooked up as on the Secondary IDE channel as master. I have a cheap CD ROM as the slave. Like I was saying, it only reads at 900K to 2000K in DVD shrink when previewing and ripping. I haven't tried reauthor mode and I don't see many settings in the software to change read speeds. I've taken the machine out and put in another machine and it does about the same.
I'm not sure if it's 80 pin or not, but usually if it isn't it gives you an 80 pin connector failure on boot. When I go to Device manager the secondary IDE channel shows DMA mode 4. It only showed DMA mode 2 with the default IDE cable that came with the drive.
It also came pre installed with BY03, however I installed BY02 and it didn't make a difference.
I'll probably try what the other two guys said and try a different software package or just buy a new DVD ROM to read them and to keep the life on my burner.